A Place to Stand

Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL

A Seastead based on a Triton unit powered by an OTEC & using the deep sea water to grow algael oil, as I have previously discussed, could probably be done for about £500 million. You can't make a smaller OTEC because the energy used to pull up water depends on the diameter of the tube & thus below a certain size it uses as much power as it produces. Thus this seems to be a minimum cost. This explains why it hasn't yet been done. £500 million is a lot for any business to risk, though relatively little for a government. " possible 1st steps would be:

1 - An OTEC based on an old ship, which would otherwise be scrapped, used to create algael oil.

Friday, April 03, 2009

This is an unpublished letter sent to all national UK & Scottish papers & to many US newspapers - list appended at the end. Google News shows it has not been published. I think it demonstrates how wholly, completely & deliberately the MSM are willing to censor these atrocities & by extension, absolutely anything the government do not want us to know about.=======================Dear Editor,It is not often that the first anniversary of the publication of a bureaucrat's biography deserves discussion, however this is one. A year ago Carla del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal published her biography. In it she confirmed having, 8 years previously, investigated reports from western journalists that NATO "police," formerly known as the KLA, had kidnapped & dissected, while still alive, at least 1,300 Serb teenagers & that the presumably 10s of thousands of body parts had been flown out of Tirana airports to western destinations. Her team had indeed found a building where 300 of these murders took place together with forensic evidence proving this atrocity. Then she stopped the investigation.

Since then there have been further investigations proving that such dissections were more extensive than thought & still going on. The EU even appointed a lawyer to look into the matter.

Over the last year we have seen leader writers & front page articles denouncing the Chinese government for their "heavy handed" breaking up of riots in Tibet in which less than 2 dozen died, most of them ethnic Chinese. We have seen headlines & denunciations of Russia's action which prevented a Georgian attempt to "ethnically cleanse" the entire South Ossetian population. We have seen massive reporting of the Israeli war against Hammas in which about 800 people died, overwhelmingly Hammas combatants.

How shameful that atrocities worse in numbers, infinitely worse in cruelty & forming only a part of the crimes carried out under NATO authority have gone virtually entirely unreported by British Press & broadcasters.

PS Its OK I don't expect you to publish this. The only paper to publish even one previous letter on the subject was the Scotsman. The late Josef Goebbels managed a similar level, of censorship but then he could send journalists to concentration camps. How fortunate that today's journalists are sufficiently sensitive not to such threats to prevent them reporting.===============================List of US newspapers which are censoring thisSan Francisco ChronicleTimeThe StarNew York TimesLA TimesWall St JournalUSA TodayGlobeSeattle Times& all Scottish & UK national papers

If anybody sees this letter, even in severely edited form, published, or even if any of them report the basic facts in any way please send me a link & I will put it up here. If a single journalist, anywhere in any NATO country feels able to defend their record as being honest on this, or even explain why they are to some extent honest on any other subject I will be happy to see their comments.

Google News searches mainly show US results but we are notoriously a bit behind the US in fashions. It has long been obvious that alarmists were very much in a minority on newspaper online comments but then they are, relatively, uncensored. Indeed George Moonbat has regularly railed against the fact that this vast majority, even in the Guardian, dares to disagree with him. However if even the newspapers themselves are finding their promotion of this swindle so unpopular that they can't keep pushing it then the game is indeed up.

Now beware of the next eco-fascist scare story coming up. Here are some pld ones I put up as an April fool threat 3 years ago. Since then I have found out acid rain & obviously last years claims that we had reached peak oil were lies too. Will 1 or more of the old ones get a retread from the eco-fascists or will it be a new one?

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

With the Information Commissioner's Office website having an undertaking to answer any questions about any refusal to act on any Freedom of Information Act inquiry I got an email from them yesterday afternoon (ie 14 days after I appealed to them) saying it was a Scottish matter & I should therefore contact the separate Scottish organisation. I note that the ICO site does not mention only covering England, indeed it actively claims the opposite.

On the other hand they are merely stretching the law to protect SEPA. Their claim to have proven the radioactivity at Dalgety Bay, they are allegedly so worried about, isn't simply normal background radiation there since before humans arrived there is clearly untrue. The ICO aren't actually breaking their own rules.

However the ICO must, on a purely population basis, be finding that about 15% of queries from the public (I assume journalists will know the rules) are having to be returned, after a 14 day delay, on the grounds that they come from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. One would have thought they could run it better :-)----------------------I have emailed the Scottish Information Commissioner repeating the email I sent to the ICO with this cover:

2 weeks ago today I put this on the Information Commissioner's Office site by their complaints form

Since they guarantee to come up with a response in 14 days they have, today, said it was nothing to do with them & I should contact you. How unfortunate that the 2 organisations are not on speaking terms or they could have sent you this automatically & how unfortunate that absolutely nobody in the ICO was aware, with anything less than 14 days investigations, that no such contact was possible.

A cynical person might think they had deliberately been delaying & finding a pretext purely to protect civil servants in SEPA who have clearly & deliberately broken the law.

Please acknowledge receipt of this & whether your organisation will be able to reach a decision as to jurisdiction & everything else within 14 days.

As a general rule in engineering if you only have one theoretical way of doing something you will have unforeseen problems - when you have several methods it is going to work. This is a corollary of Murphy's law. Algae production of oil at commercial levels is going to work & fairly soon too. In due course it will very seriously undercut present sources. It would take quite hard work to remain in recession in such circumstances (though I have no doubt the eco-fascists will come up with reasons for doing that work).

SIDE EFFECT 1I blogged previously about the Aquarius project of a floating city in equatorial waters using the temperature differential between surface water & deep ocean water to generate power & as a side effect allow this deep water, which is rich in nutrients (being heavier than water such elements sink) to grow algae in surrounding containment ponds covering square miles. This seasteading programme now looks to me to be very feasible indeed. The great attraction to ideological seasteaders is that it gets them out from under conventional governments. The attraction for the non-ideological is equatorial sun & the happy chance that on the equator there are no Coriolis forces & thus no hurricanes. The attraction for scientists & bankers is no regulation. If seasteading gets going it will provide a major alternative to present government & laboratory conditions for small unit government systems. We may well find conventional governments trying to strangle this even when there is no possible benefit to them eg

SIDE EFFECT 2Anybody who has read Heinlein's Friday (I regard Heinlein as a political philosopher who could run rings round Rand) will have seen that a subplot, of this incredibly densely plotted book, is that the company that invented a battery that can hold far more energy than conventional batteries effectively runs the world. Well guess what - - oil does that, scalable unlimited producible oil does it better.

The chances of this are 1 in 500 each year not that one will come around every 500 years & that we need only worry in 2358AD. Now if this is scary & it should be lets not overplay it. Firstly we are now in a period of low sunspots so the odds of it any time in the next few years are far lower. Secondly it can be avoided:

If we update infrastructure over the next 10-15 years as part of routine maintenance it should be possible to protect systems at a reasonable cost. The risk is not that nothing can be done but that since we have no experience of this, governments will simply ignore it, as indeed they have up to now. Unlike Y2K there isn't a deadline to stimulate thought, however it is clearly a much more real problem than that & a more imminent problem than catastrophic warming. I also think more real but certainly more imminent is unarguable. This is not the sort of scare that can be easily visualised by Luddites which is the problem.